Yue-Ting Siu, incoming director of SF State's Program in Visual Impairments, comments on the recent national decline in the teaching of Braille - archive

Submitted by Nolan Muna on Mon, 2016-07-25 09:12

Yue-Ting Siu, incoming director of SF State's Program in Visual Impairments, comments on the recent national decline in the teaching of Braille

One reason for Braille’s current decline may be the growing number of students with multiple disabilities, said Yue-Ting Siu, a Braille educator and consultant. In the 1950s and ‘60s, she said, many students who were classified as blind identified as typical in other ways. But now, she said, more students with visual impairments have cognitive disabilities that make it harder for them to absorb language.

Siu is about to become director of San Francisco State University’s program that trains teachers for the blind, one of two such training programs in California. Together, they produced 208 graduates between 2011 and 2015 in a state in which 3,670 students listed visual impairment as their primary disability in December 2015....